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Hugh Pickens writes "Last week Gizmodo had a special celebration of 1979, the last year before a digital tsunami hit, that put Bill Gates in a nostalgic mood this week. Bill chimed in with his own memories of that seminal year when everything changed. 'In 1979, Microsoft had 13 employees, most of whom appear in that famous picture that provides indisputable proof that your average computer geek from the late 1970s was not exactly on the cutting edge of fashion,' wrote Gates. 'By the end of the year we'd doubled in size to 28 employees. Even though we were doing pretty well, I was still kind of terrified by the rapid pace of hiring and worried that the bottom could fall out at any time.' What made Gates feel a little more confident was that he began to sense that BASIC was on the verge of becoming the standard language for microcomputers. 'By the middle of 1979, BASIC was running on more than 200,000 Z-80 and 8080 machines and we were just releasing a new version for the 8086 16-bit microprocessor. As the numbers grew, we were starting to think beyond programming languages, too, and about the possibility of creating applications that would have real mass appeal to consumers.' Gates remembers that in 1979 there were only 100 different software products that had more than $100 M in annual sales and all of them were for mainframes. 'In April, the 8080 version of BASIC became the first software product built to run on microprocessors to win an ICP Million Dollar Award. Today, I would be surprised if the number of million-dollar applications isn't in the millions itself' writes Gates. 'More important, of course, is the fact that more than a billion people around the world use computers and digital technology as an integral part of their day-to-day lives. That's something that really started to take shape in 1979.'"

Okay what's so special about 1979? It's not as if PCs didn't exist prior to that point. Wasn't the Apple II released two years earlier? And Atari 400/800 PCs one year earlier. Contrary to Gate's revisionist history, the revolution did not start with Microsoft.

Even a year later in 1980 the world wasn't really any different - people still watched analog television recorded onto analog VHS tapes (or Betamax). Some had laserdiscs which were... also analog... or RCA videorecords that used 100-year-old needl

Are you sure of that? If it weren't for Windows' stranglehold, OS design would be probably a decade ahead of where it is now, millions of man-hours would not have been lost to fixing/cleaning up malware/etc, and we'd all probably be a little bit richer. Is one multi-billionaire philanthropist worth a thousand multi-millionaire philanthropists?

It depends though, some of us might be richer, however some of us might be poorer because we made a lot of money doing tech support with issues that wouldn't have been there if it wasn't for Windows. Now, I don't think this is an excuse for how buggy Windows is, but its an interesting aspect.

Are you sure of that? If it weren't for Windows' stranglehold, OS design would be probably a decade ahead of where it is now, millions of man-hours would not have been lost to fixing/cleaning up malware/etc, and we'd all probably be a little bit richer. Is one multi-billionaire philanthropist worth a thousand multi-millionaire philanthropists?

Do you also think that Billavius Gatus the axe-maker's axe market domination prevented the advancement of the axe for 3000 years? In other words, do you honestly believe that success stifles progress?

I tend to agree with that. BUT, maybe not. I hate Gates, but when you start talking about "What if?" no one can know. If Gates hadn't come along to help popularize computers, it's possible that we wouldn't be as far along now as we are. Whatever else Gates did, right and wrong, he DID help to make it easy for your average dimwit to get started in computing. Ultimately, his actions made helped to make computers look desirable to a lot of people who would never

Taking this a bit further; there had to be a de-facto standard for home computers before they were adopted by the masses. Just like Blu-ray and HD-DVD can't co-exist, and Beta and VHS before that, etc. The majority of people won't participate until there's a clear winner.

Gates was lucky to be there at the right time on the right platform, and his ruthlessness ensured that Microsoft would be a standard. If it weren't him, it would have been someone else.

Whilst a "standard" has its advantages, unfortunately Microsoft aren't comparable to other standards. Can anyone come along and write their Windows compatible OS? Are there other companies doing so? No. It would be like if there was only one company that could make VHS or Blu-Ray, or if all computers were made by IBM.

But until that happened, there wasn't the same relentless drive for faster, better, cheaper computers that we take for granted today. The Commodore 64 was popular for years with identical hardw

BECAUSE Gates and others had the vision of a putting an affordable computer in every home, millions of youngsters today have the opportunity to learn, who may not have been exposed to comptuers unti they reached college age.

Huh?

How do you figure Microsoft had anything to do with it?

First off, IBM PCs and clones were originally for business use. For home use people used Apple ][, TRS-80, Commodore PET Sinclair ZX-80, Acorn BBC micro, etc, etc. Nothing to do with IBM or Microsoft.

The idea of making computers based on commodity hardware and open standards wasn't new to the IBM PC (and had nothing to do with Microsoft). Before the IBM PC + DOS standard there was the S-100 bus and CP/M.

If Microsoft had never existed it'd just mean that IBM chose another OS for the IBM PC, or obtained DOS direct from Seattle computer rather than via Microsoft. If the IBM PC never took off then the existing S-100 + CP/M would have continued until something better came long. And in the meantime the hobbyists would still be running all the other computers being produced by everyone else!

The idea of making computers based on commodity hardware and open standards wasn't new to the IBM PC (and had nothing to do with Microsoft). Before the IBM PC + DOS standard there was the S-100 bus and CP/M.

IBM didn't have much at all to do with standards. When it tried (the PS/2) it was mostly ignored. Even the clone makers weren't really about standards so much for a long time, as what resulted were defacto standards as the clone makers just tried to be compatible with each other while being just one step ahead.

Maybe it would be. Maybe, though, that whole "computer stuff" would not have taken off as it did and computers would still be the toys of geeks because nobody else could figure them out, the internet would still be the geeks' meeting place because nobody else could figure out how to connect to it...

Say about MS what you want, but they knew how to make things easy for the masses. You could connect to the internet using Windows a decade ago without knowing whether TCP/IP was a protocol or the abbreviation for

Worth it indeed. The fact that he has accumulated more wealth then you could spend in 100 lifetimes; so deigns to donate a fraction of it on his pet-charities, speaks volumes of the chronic failure of our economic system.

Gates' fortune is chump change compared with the many, many billions that have been lost to the products bugs, sluggishness and security problems.

If that were true, then Windows products would not be considered a positive investment, so therefor, they would not be getting purchases. The fact of the matter is that the sluggishness, bugs, and security problems are often more FUD spread by competitors than they are actual reality. Indeed, Linux has more than its share of bugs, sluggishness and security probl

C'mon, by now it should be known that sales have nothing to do with product quality but rather with marketing. And you have to give it to MS, they have a brilliant marketing department.

If you don't know how purchases are done in companies, you've never been in the situation where you should be the one responsible for purchase and acquisition, until some manager comes in telling you you absolutely HAVE to buy $product because he just came back from a business trip to $holiday_resort with $salesperson_for_product and it's so absolutely awesome...

Sorry to disagree with you, but I would have no problem at all living in a world where OS/2 was the rival OS to Apple and Amiga. OS/2 Warp 3.0 was my first deeply personal experience with x86 computers, the platform I installed on my first home-brewed 486-class PC that ran a BBS out of my home (well, second, if you count the years I used an Atari ST). It was a great system and gave me the tools I needed to find a job in the tech industry. I still have (and frequently wear) my old Team OS/2 tee shirt.

Microsoft doesn't release an operating system in 5 years - people bitch. Microsoft releases a new operating system - people bitch. Microsoft's operating system drops some legacy support for some apps - people bitch. Despite Microsoft giving literally over a year of public betas for hardware vendors to get their drivers up to scratch, they don't - people bitch at Microsoft. Download Squad makes a bunch of childish remarks - everyons agrees.

How many of you have actually used Vista on decent hardware (post-2004) and had problems with it? That doesn't include: I don't like the search features, I don't like the fact that 512 megs of my 2 gigs of ram that I don't use anyhow are taken up, I want my 5 extra frames of Counter-strike back that were way above my monitor's response time and refresh rate back.

Been using Vista since Beta 2 and haven't had any problems aside for some Nero 7 incompatibilities (that were fixed during RC1) and some ATI driver issues during RC1. Just as stable as XP (didn't have any problems with it either, so I can't say more stable), more responsive and generally better to use.

That doesn't include: I don't like the search features, I don't like the fact that 512 megs of my 2 gigs of ram that I don't use anyhow are taken up, I want my 5 extra frames of Counter-strike back that were way above my monitor's response time and refresh rate back.

I understand what you are and why I should not be responding to you, but you force a good question: Why don't those count? If I had an "upgrade" that forced uncomfortable functionality and a drop in performance (excluding hardware incompatibilities like the giant printer fiasco) on me without bringing anything new to the table (you DID just say that its just as stable as XP), AND I had to shell out $$$ for it, I'd be pissed too. Even if I didn't have to shell out $$$ for it, its something I would avoid.

"Microsoft doesn't release an operating system in 5 years - people bitch. Microsoft releases a new operating system - people bitch. Microsoft's operating system drops some legacy support for some apps - people bitch."

"How many of you have actually used Vista on decent hardware (post-2004) and had problems with it? That doesn't include: I don't like the search features, I don't like the fact that 512 megs of my 2 gigs of ram that I don't use anyhow are taken up, I want my 5 extra frames of Counter-strike back that were way above my monitor's response time and refresh rate back."

Oooh, ooh, ooh, I'll take this one!

Decent hardware - 2007 new purchase machines do you? A "viability" project for professional deployment of Del

How many of you have actually used Vista on decent hardware (post-2004) and had problems with it?

I have, but the problems were very mild and the computer really did feel faster than XP. Copying gigs of data through identical versions of iTunes was significantly faster. I also enjoy looking at Vista much more: no more 1-pixel-wide fonts when using 1920x1200 resolution. It still lags behind a modern Linux distro in the look and feel department, but it's clearly an improvement over "Windows 2000 with a blue Start Bar."

Ultimately, I reverted to Windows XP because of sound latency issues with Vista. I'm

How about the fact that interface makes me feel seasick, I'm sick and tired of either having to constantly click OK or disable UAC entirely, and it is, in fact, less responsive then XP on the same hardware. Yes, the hardware is post-2004; 2.4GHz dual core with 8GB DDR-2 RAM. Oh, and arbitrarily hiding options, that have been in one location for multiple releases now, under menus and menus of crap.

Yes, I have serious problems with Vista, and yes, I actually used it for a long time. I switched to the Win

What's the overhead like on getting it back when I did want to use it? The 'your PC's memory should always be full, otherwise you're wasting it" argument only works if there is no memory management overhead. If there's no wait time for me to move memory content to the swap so that I can open the big photo/spreadsheet/movie/simulation/etc that actually needs that memory, then there's no problem. If I need that memory, I want it without delay. If default behavior adds delay as a norm, that's a problem. Thus,

I know some of the more senior geeks here will scoff, but I learned programming with BASIC back in 2004-2005. I know there's a lot of hate for Microsoft and VB, but I fondly remember the simple language that built the two.

I too taught myself programming with BASIC, but a tad bit earlier than you - around the year the article is about to be honest, maybe a year or two later... Sinclair ZX-80, let me count the ways I'm thankful to you:)

BASIC -> Z80 assembler -> DOS batch -> bash -> Perl -> Java, sometimes I miss the early days of typing in code listings from ZX Magazine and the like, trying to find out why the code worked (or not, more likely). Aah, better days - or maybe it was just that I was better then;)

Some of the senior geeks remember HP BASIC, etc. and using it to do real work. I've seen CFD and FEA done with Quick Basic on a 386 in a laboratory environment. If your choices were BASIC and FORTRAN (both were common in engineering applications in the 80's and on through the '90's), the BASIC compiler was often cheaper by an order of magnitude and more approachable.

BASIC is good only for teaching the "programmers mindset" in how to reason and think with code. The language itself does nothing but teach you terribly bad habits that will plague your code if you use anything else.

A point of view which, in 1979, was widely held by people at university who had easy access to minis and mainframes with the grunt to run Pascal or Algol compilers.

Meanwhile, those of us using $300 6502 or Z80 systems with 4K of RAM and a only domestic cassette tape recorder as mass storage found that BASIC wasn't so bad when the only practical alternative was lovingly hand-crafted machine code.

Speaking of which, when I tried to learn 6502 machine code from someone else's handwritten notes which didn't co

"In 1979, Microsoft had 13 employees [...] By the end of the year we'd doubled in size to 28 employees."

With arithmetic like that no wonder Windows is the sleek model of perfection it is...

Yeah! He should have said "By the end of the year our employees increased by 2.153 times". But nooooo! He had to use an approximation when telling his story.Yep, it's proof that he's just incredibly unintelligent and incapable of writing good software!/sarcasm

But it shouldn't be too surprising that there might be so many million dollar products today compared to 1979 since the dollar has been decimated in value since in the last 30 years by inflation. A million dollar app in 2009 dollars would be worth nearly $3M.

Actually, 'decimate' means to reduce by a tenth. At least, that is the archaic meaning - when the Roman army was instructed to decimate a population, they would kill one in ten people (or one in ten men), which was usually sufficient to make a population choose subservience without reducing them to a level where they were practically useless to the empire.

To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?

Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.

The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.

Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?

Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.

What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.

I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.

Good day and compliments. This letter will definitely come to you as a huge surprise, but I implore you to take the time to go through it carefully as the decision you make will go off a long way to determine the future and continued existence of the entire members of my family.

Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is William Gates, the 2nd husband of the widow of the late head of state and commander in chief of the armed forces of the federal republic of Nigeria who died on the 8th of June 1975.

My ordeal started immediately after her husband's death on the morning of 8th June 1975, and the subsequent take over of government by the last administration. The present democratic government is determined to portray all the good work of her late husband in a bad light and have gone as far as confiscating all her late husband's assets, properties, freezing our accounts both within and outside Nigeria. As I am writing this letter to you, my son Mohammed Abacha is undergoing questioning with the government. All these measures taken by past/present government is just to gain international recognition.

I and the entire members of my family have been held incommunicado since the death of her husband, hence I seek your indulgence to assist us in securing these funds. We are not allowed to see or discuss with anybody. Few occasions I have tired traveling abroad through alternative means all failed.

It is in view of this I have mandated DR GALADIMA HASSAN, who has been assisting the family to run around on so many issues to act on behalf of the family concerning the substance of this letter. He has the full power of attorney to execute this transaction with you.

Her late husband had/has Eighty Million USD ($80,000,000.00) specially preserved and well packed in trunk boxes of which only my husband and I knew about. It is packed in such a way to forestall just anybody having access to it. It is this sum that I seek your assistance to get out of Nigeria as soon as possible before the present civilian government finds out about it and confiscate it just like they have done to all our assets.

I implore you to please give consideration to my predicament and help a widow and her new husband in need.

May Allah show you mercy as you do so?

Your faithfully,

William H. Gates III

N/B: Please contact Dr Galadima Hassan on this e-mail address for further briefing and modalities

Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?

Why do I get the sense that even in 1976, Bill Gates was a small, petty person with a sense of entitlement? It's no wonder that Microsoft turned out the way it did.

From: "How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates"http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/ [greenspun.com] """William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks.

More on what dumpster diving meant to Bill Gates:http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=437640&cid=22255952 [slashdot.org]"""Interviewer: Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer?Bill Gates: No. the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system. You got to be willing to read other people's code, then write your own, then have other people review your code. You've got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you're doing wrong."""

You got to be willing to read other people's code, then write your own, then have other people review your code. You've got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you're doing wrong.

Quite a clear endorsement of the open source model. And if the source he dived for had had an explicit open source license, he not only would have had every right to take them, but he could have insisted on having it:-)

Of course eventually, these guy realize that not only are they not millionaires, they're not making much progress toward that noble goal. That's when they get ugly. You see, they see themselves as capable, intelligent, hard working people - and they are for the most part - who "have what it takes" to "make

Is that most people who are not millionaires but are working to become one would freely admit that they if they don't get there, its because they weren't good enough. You can work hard, study hard, etc, but, if you aren't good enough, you don't get to make the team millionaire. But along the way you do grow from what you do. You've tried to build a business, have made products, have made some sales, have learned about your gut and how the world really works. Those things you can only get from stepping into the ring, as Teddy Roosevelt so famously observed, and that, there's a certain thing you get just from getting in there and putting up your dukes.

What is important to us is having the opportunity to try and chase one's goals, and, if you listen to what we say, you would hear that over and over again - the Constitution doesn't guarantee success, but the right to pursue it. Nothing in life is guaranteed. The American dream is not getting rich per se, its about having the opportunity to try. When you guys on the left ramble on about guarantees, you've missed the point of life altogether. You want to have all of these guarantees for yourselves and in doing so really undermine your own ability to say, at the end, that you lived your life yourself. You want to trade away the opportunity for order, just because, you don't think you can succeed. That's just utterly pathetic.

So yeah, Bill Gates got rich. I didn't. Maybe I never will. I don't care and Bill Gate's wealth doesn't bother me. He got the opportunity to live his dream and I got the opportunity to live mine, and however I use my opportunity, my life, is my business, and has nothing to do with him, and has nothing to do with you.

Is that most people who are not millionaires but are working to become one would freely admit that they if they don't get there, its because they weren't good enough. You can work hard, study hard, etc, but, if you aren't good enough, you don't get to make the team millionaire.

They would freely admit that, but they'd be wrong. Just because people drank the kool-aid and then agree with the guy at the front of the room behind the podium doesn't mean they're all right.

The America you describe might have existed in the previous centuries, but at this point in time, the system is showing extravagant fault.

All those guys who already became millionaires? They spend all their time making sure they stay millionaires. In order for them to stay millionaires, it means they have to keep ot

Bill Gate's could have spent his lifetime writing free software. That being born a multi-millionaire was not enough for him is a sign of an illness that causes "financial obesity", not something to be emulated. But, in the end, it is not Bill Gates who has destroyed our society as much as all the people who want to be the next Bill Gates and support regressive social policies they hope to benefit from someday.

It's a poor, twisted soul that even thinks to call wealth 'financial obesity', or refer to it as an

Let's say we're both in line at Fortune 500 company for a VP promotion. We can't both have our candles lit, can we?

Implicit in your question is the assumption that the VP promotion is the only way for that individual to generate wealth beyond what he already posesses. It also implies a fixation on working for someone else to generate wealth, but someone has to start all these companies that grow into fortune 500 companies and employ thousands of people and a few VP's.

Wealth is a zero sum game. Not everyone can be wealthy. Period.I'll agree that not everyone can be wealthy, but that doesn't make it zero sum. If it was a zero sum game, we could not have far more wealthy people than the world has seen before, and we could not have a vast majority of western countries with citizens who enjoy material wealth not even possible 100 years ago.

That wealth was generated by human activity. It was not taken from someone else, because there was no one to take it from.

The response of the Hobbyist community was to write and release a version of Basic for the same machine that only used 2K of memory (not the 4K that Micro-Soft Basic used) and they gave it away free.......does that sound familiar....

Can't say i did much in basic, but the one language i cut my teeth on was turing. I still remember the final project myself and a friend teamed up on wouldn't run on any of the school computers (at the time, we incorporated SVGA mouse driven 3D-menu systems and 16-bit sound). I had to lug my old, steel cased, full sized tower system that weighed a ton or more, into the school to demonstrate the program to our teacher in order to get the credit for it.

No - systems like that were before microprocessors. They were based on multiple logic chips.

The first microprocessor - CPU on a chip - was the Intel 4004 introduced in 1971, designed to power desktop calculators.

One of the earliest computers was the SCELBI Mark 8, powered by the Intel 8008, introduced in 1974. However, he MITS Altair 8800 (based on the Intel 8080), launched in 1975 can really be regarded as the beginning of the personal computer industry... It rocketed to fame by being featured on the cover

Well... I would say that it really mushroomed when the Sinclair ZX 80 was made and later on ZX 81 (Timex here in North America.) 99% of my computer literate friends started on these (yes this be Europe.) Note also that these were not running MS Basic.

I was not dissing Billy not knowing about PET... he definitely knows (how could he not?) I was just referring to the blatant and consistent laps of showing "credit where credit is due." If it wasn't for inexpensive computers like Commodore and Sinclair we might

I still have my 8080-based Interact computer from back then AND a (legal) copy of MS BASIC for it on tape. One thing I distinctly recall is that the Peek and Poke commands did not work out of the box. For Poke, you had to first enter "poke xxxxx,yy" or poke would result in an error. The poke command itself would execute, and then check this address for yy and return an error for any other value. A sort of lock. Not sure if Interact or MS decided to put this in. There was another series of things to do to unlock the peek command. IIRC there was a separate lock on the 2K rom address range. Do I still get in legal trouble if I post the values of XXXX,YY?? They are still burned into my brain. Does anyone at Microsoft still have this basic or know how to unlock these commands? I wonder...

But this sounds more like a bug than DRM. Presumably the code was attempting to check the value you'd just written, but was actually checking a fixed address due to omitting some indirection. Which is easy to do in assembler.

That sounds fair enough. And, in any case, Microsoft's product was embedded in ROM - certainly it was for TRS-80 and even the IBM PC has a ROM BASIC. So they didn't really need DRM for a while. Sometimes I still drool over the possibility of Windows in ROM, and am interested in Linux

1) I was NOT talking about syntax. xxxx,yy are place holders for specific fixed values that I did not provide so as not to get sued (that's a joke OK).

2) The interpreter specifically checked fixed address xxxxx for fixed value yy AFTER the command was executed. If yy was not found it errored out. This was not a check that the poke worked, it was to make it appear that the command wasn't supported (which should have been indicated by SN error, but was something else). Having hacked the interpr

Gates remembers that in 1979 there were only 100 different software products that had more than $100 M in annual sales and all of them were for mainframes. 'In April, the 8080 version of BASIC became the first software product built to run on microprocessors to win an ICP Million Dollar Award. Today, I would be surprised if the number of million-dollar applications isn't in the millions itself' writes Gates.

But it took until 1984 for him to see what the real desktop computing revolution would look like, and it took him more than a decade after that in order to make a Mac knock-off that didn't completely suck donkey balls.

You mean Windows 95? Yeah, poor Gates. While Apple was making computers that looked pretty and people wanted to use, Microsoft was making computers that did vital work and people had to use.

Actually I'd say it was more like 1982 when IBM released the IBM PC, or when Apple's spreadsheet made their PC more than a toy, something that was used in business. Yes, there was the Altair, Commodore, etc in the seventies, but that was a gentle wave, not a tsunami.

the digital tsunami hit way before 1979, and plenty of us had been running BASIC (and better languages) on our microcomputers for years before that, and it wasn't a Micro-Soft product

Well, in 1979 a lot of 8080 or Z80 machines were running either a ROM-based Microsoft BASIC or a floppy-based one (CP/M MBASIC, for instance). But the "tsunami" (who makes up this stuff?) definitely started with much earlier [wikipedia.org] rumblings [wikipedia.org].

In point of fact, though, there's still a very real chance that if you were running BASIC on

Well, I'm no fan of Microsoft, but Microsoft BASIC was very early and fairly ubiquitous. It was originally written in '75 for the MITS Altair, which really is the beginning of the personal computer industry excepting a few obscure very low volume products most people have never heard of.

The BASIC interpreters for many (but not all) of the early machines were all from Microsoft: MITS Altair BASIC, Commodore PET BASIC, Applesoft BASIC, TRS-80 Level II BASIC. Some that weren't by Microsoft are Apple I/II Integ

Yes, why would we recognize the birth of one of the largest and most influential technology companies -- a company that largely defined how personal computer would run. Even if you don't like their products or practices, Microsoft is a huge part of personal computing history.

Maybe it's my analytical mind but it took me 14 seconds until I spotted the pattern, and a further 50 or so to confirm it against all the examples in the text. And, to be honest, I never even *thought* about the petals thing and then when I tried to apply it, it was a further 5 or so seconds to work out the exact "real-world" relationship that the hint is supposed to show. To be honest, if it hadn't jumped out at me, a simple simultaneous equation would solve that